Obituaries are forever

Now that the Mueller Report is out, it makes clear what most of us have known all along—that the faux-president of the United States is an incompetent con man liar who committed crimes while campaigning for election and has continued to commit crimes during the two-plus years he has disgraced the office of the presidency.

In a normal environment, those crimes would result in his impeachment and removal from office, but nothing about this presidency has ever been normal.

Therefore, over the next year and a half, we can expect Trump to continue to assault democracy, spew out a dozen lies a day and hold pep rallies to campaign for re-election, where he and his followers will chant “no collusion, no obstruction” and paint the Special Counsel’s probe as a “witch hunt” by 18 angry Democrats bent on bringing down his administration.

Just today, in his most recent Twitter fusillade:

* Trump refers to the “Crazy Mueller Report” and claims that statements made to the Counsel’s office by “Trump Haters” were “fabricated & totally untrue.”  

* He warns, “Watch out for people that take so-called ‘notes,’ when the notes never existed until needed.”

* And, he added, “Because I never agreed to testify, it was not necessary for me to respond to statements made in the ‘Report’ about me, some of which are total bullshit & only given to make the other person look good (or me to look bad). This was an Illegally Started Hoax that never should have happened….”

All of which brings me to three points:

(1) First, if Trump finds it “not necessary” to respond to the Crazy Mueller Report, then why is he responding to it?

(2) Second, when told by then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions that Mueller had been appointed to investigate him, Trump responded, “Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my presidency. I’m fucked.” Now I don’t know about you, but I don’t hear those as the words of an innocent man.

(3) And third—and most importantly—whatever Trump says and does between now and the day he dies, and whether or not he manages to avoid impeachment and get himself re-elected, the findings of the Mueller Report will hang around his neck like one of his long red ties. It will be there forever, and when he dies, it will be featured prominently in stories about his passing.

They will read something like this:

Donald J. Trump, the 45^th president of the United States who was the subject of a two-year investigation into alleged conspiracy to rig his election and subsequent, multiple attempts to obstruct the probe into his activities, died today….

A 22-month investigation led by Special Counsel Robert Mueller found numerous connections between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives who helped him defeat Hillary Rodham Clinton in the 2016 presidential election, as well as a coordinated campaign to obstruct the investigation by firing or trying to fire people involved in the probe.

Mueller’s team did not file criminal charges against Trump because of a Department of Justice guideline that prohibited indicting a sitting president, but left it to Congress to deal with the issues of collusion and obstruction.

Mueller’s team made it clear, however, that their findings “did not exonerate the president” for his crimes.  

And that’s the legacy that Donald Trump will leave behind. It will be reported in media around the world when he dies and written down in history books so our children and grandchildren and their children and grandchildren will know the story, and like all other recorded history, it will never go away.

So while life is fleeting, obituaries are forever. In that regard, Mr. Trump, you really are "fucked," and that’s exactly what you deserve.